In reply to Robert Williams.

Robert,
I have to fully agree with you on Cisco lack of support for Small VAR's. We too are in an area where Large installs are far and few between and even medium installs are very few but when we get opportunity to do one we need support. Just yesterday I contacted every single Cisco person I could and got the run around. First the standard online chat but they said they could not help me as I belong part of a partner. Then to partner contact people and they had no clue of Cisco stuff that I was desiring and was reading the same spec sheets just like I was. 5 HOURS of trying to get help to make proper recommendation for customer and Cisco provided absolutely no help. I actually had to hang up on one person at reseller presales line as she refused to do anything I asked and was just reading the spec sheets. It has to be a dire situation for me to hang up a phone on someone but Cisco has, like you said, provided no real support for resellers of the areas like ours that have few big businesses. Couple that with Cisco's lack of having almost noone for support with English as thier first language.
Before working for this small VAR I spent 10 years supporting some of the worlds largest networks and some really great Cisco products. Now my boss is going to send us to Adtran and Juniper training as they seem to have the support when we need it. As I reflect back it seems that when I worked on large networks there was a direct rep that put me in touch with the proper person but if you don't have that it seems we are abondoned. 5 hours of trying to narrow down the differences of various firewalls is totally ridiculous and I ended up contacting 2 of my CCIE previous coworkers to get a few spare minutes out of their busy work days to make my recommendation. Client wants Cisco but I did send him in addition to my Cisco recommendation a Juniper comparable product.